Robert Raclea achieved the second highest score in the 5th International Student Chemistry Olympiad held in Moscow State University in March 2017.

Robert Raclea, who has just completed his first year in Chemistry with Medicinal Chemistry, has achieved the second highest score in the 5th International Student Chemistry Olympiad held in the Faculty of Chemistry of Moscow State University (MSU) in March 2017. This competition, which is held annually and is open to undergraduate and research students of Chemistry from throughout the world, has great prestige, and for the first time this year applications were invited from English as well as from Russian speakers.

The competition has two stages. In the first, the distant or selection stage, which for English-speaking students took place in November 2016, applicants were asked to submit by e-mail solutions to chemical problems devised by MSU staff: for Russian-speaking students this stage took place in February 2017. In March 2017 the originators of the best solutions, as assessed by MSU professors, were invited to come to Moscow for a week for the final stage of the competition. It took the form of a five-hour written examination designed to test chemical knowledge, originality and technical resourcefulness. The majority of the 35-40 finalists came from the faculties of Chemistry in the universities of the Russian Federation, among which MSU’s Faculty of Chemistry is preeminent.

Robert’s success in winning the second place in this competition is a remarkable achievement. Besides the competition there was a full cultural programme: sightseeing in the Kremlin and in Moscow generally, visits to factories, talks by experts from the chemical industry and feedback from MSU staff on the solutions submitted in the application process and the final examination. Participants from outside the Russian Federation were offered hostel accommodation. Robert had the advantage of having taken Russian Level 1 as part of the Imperial Horizons programme. His conclusion: “It was an amazing experience.”